Building a Better Future

At his offices in one of Chelsea's historic factory buildings, the ebullient Danish architect Bjarke Ingels is hovering over an oddly shaped Taskboard model. One of the latest designs to emerge from his upstart firm, the brashly named BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), this vision of a New York apartment complex has a startling profile totally at odds with the grids of crew-cut, square-shouldered towers dotting the Manhattan skyline.

Angling upward to a point, like a child's drawing of an alp, it is not quite a high-rise. (Ingels is fond of neologisms and has dubbed it a "mid-rise.") Nor is it a pyramid. ("Geometrically, it's a hyperbolic paraboloid, but that's not very sexy.") Even more at odds with Modernist convention, there is a 25,000-square-foot garden deeply indented into one of the building's long sloping flanks. He calls it "our Central Park."

This improbable object is taking form under the aegis of the buttoned-up but eco-friendly Durst Fetner real-estate family and will occupy a block between 11th and 12th Avenues at the corner of 57th Street, a rough stretch of town more familiar to truckers than pedestrians. There will be 600 rental units and a row of shops on the ground floor. Already one of the city's most anticipated buildings, though it won't be completed until late 2015, it may well turn out to be just as unusual on the inside.

Ingels crouches next to the model and points to one of the last elements he and his team have been working on: a giant periscope for the lobby. "We tested it," he assures me. "When you come in, you'll be able to look into the courtyard of the garden and see the leaves on the trees, the seasons, the sun setting over the Hudson."

WSJ Magazine's "Innovator of the Year Awards" gives this year's architecture prize to Bjarke Ingels.

The youthful face of Ingels, when framed and magnified by the tiny windows in this bold project or when talking in his video lectures on the Web, offers one of the most optimistic pictures of what the future of architecture might be. At the tender age of 37 he has gained a world-wide reputation for daring to think grandly about cities in the visionary manner of Le Corbusier, and for translating his hopeful philosophy of "pragmatic utopianism" into a thriving practice that has even caught the eye of bottom-line New York real-estate developers.

Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale architecture school, describes Ingels and his "big-picture view," which he first encountered at a 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, as "back to the future." The startling scale of some of BIG's ideas "flies in the face of current thinking," which favors small-scale urbanism rather than remaking the planet.

According to Ingels, "sustainability" and "green" architecture have for too long been associated with cold showers and turning off the lights when you leave a room. But hedonism is too strong a human impulse, he believes. Shunning "the Protestant idea that it has to hurt to do good," Ingels thinks that buildings can address environmental concerns and still be beautiful, perplexing, comfortable, ironic, joyful and fun. Urban tower blocks don't have to be crammed with dreary rectangles. They can have courtyard gardens and submarine-like periscopes, and still be cost-effective.

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Ingels kicking back in his Copenhagen office early in his career
Courtesy of Big

A BIG hotel would have an indoor swimming pool and a supermarket with linked pipes that would allow both to be "each other's heat exchange." His (unbuilt) "Scandinavian Skyscraper" is braided into three Escher-like columns that would, he claims, also better resist destabilizing winds.

Thinking BIG is not limited to single structures either. At the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, he presented a gargantuan urban "bracelet" to link southern Sweden and northern Denmark through an "energy loop," whereby solar panels would produce electricity, the excess power going to electric-car charging stations.

These are the firm's pipe dreams. Perhaps its most celebrated and finished (in 2008) project to date is the condominium complex known as "Mountain Dwellings" on the island of Ørestad near Copenhagen. Each tenant has a terraced garden, the assembly sitting atop a naturally ventilated parking garage that acts as a sloping "podium" for the residences. Across its perforated facade, BIG has remastered a photograph of Mount Everest that Ingels says is "the world's largest black-and-white image."

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THE FUTURE IS HERE | A rendering of the 57th Street building
Ulrik Jantzen, courtesy of Big

Ingenious solutions to messy design challenges have become a BIG trademark. In a 2002 competition to build a Maritime Youth House on an island near Copenhagen, Ingels and his team were faced with a seemingly impossible task: Make something that would function as a sailing club for children on a site contaminated with toxic waste. But after engineers determined the pollutants were heavy metals and wouldn't interact with the surroundings, BIG created an undulating wooden roof over the offensive materials that doubles as a walkway. It is now an active neighborhood hangout where kids slide down the wavy "dunes" and adults walk their dogs in the evenings.

Ingels is only half-joking when he attributes the happy result—saving the government from expensive cleanup while inaugurating a vital public space—to his team's refusal "to move the problem, but rather to sweep it under the (wooden) carpet."

A puckish irreverence, calculated to upend the cliché of the tortured master builder, is integral to his impressive resume. Quick to laugh, habitually sweeping locks of blonde hair off his forehead, he is an eager listener who often seconds others' observations with a "yeah, yeah, yeah." Although he has lectured on architecture at Harvard and Rice, he is also fully conversant with pop culture. His repertoire of quotes includes selections from Nietzsche and the TV series "Breaking Bad."

Words and images are among his favorite materials to play with. Raised in a Danish family without artistic ambitions (his mother is a dentist, his father an engineer), he felt no pressure growing up in a coastal town to please anyone but himself. His fantasy at the age of 18 was to become a comic-book artist. He figured that two years at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen would, if nothing else, teach him to "get better at drawing backgrounds" for his cartoons.

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"Mountain Dwellings," on which Ingels reproduced a giant photograph of Mount Everest
Courtesy of Big

Architecture was an accidental discovery. Inspired by a professor with a passionate social agenda, Ingels began an intense course of self-study in the school library, reading monographs and histories on the subject "from A to Z." When he dropped out, after five years, he knew that he wanted to design and build and teach.

Ingels's rousing manifesto cum graphic novel, "Yes Is More," is therefore no sideline but a synthesis of youthful aspirations. A fast-paced history of modern and postmodern architecture, narrated by a photo-cartoon of Ingels, it outlines, in panels of illustration and dialog bubbles, his own theories of the future as embodied in some 35 BIG projects. Self-published in 2009, it was repackaged by Taschen last year and is a cult hit that will soon be available in 15 languages.

But underlying his puns and jokes is a bedrock of sober, Danish pragmatism. And credit for his undogmatic approach is due in part, he thinks, to his former boss, the trail-blazing Dutch architect and urban planner Rem Koolhaas. "He showed me that every building has an 'angle,' the way every story needs an angle," Ingels says. "Every building addresses a different issue in a cultural-economic situation."

As we walk from his offices to lunch at a nearby Chinese restaurant, I point out the danger that he may just be telling clients what they want to hear. Who wouldn't like to believe that tenants and real-estate developers, tree huggers and SUV owners, the EPA and libertarians can get along and reconcile their bickering points of view?

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Children frollicking at the Maritime Youth House
Casper Dalhoff, courtesy of Big

"I think it's actually true," he says over the noise at a busy street corner. "The primary role of architecture in a city is facilitating the cohabitation of a lot of people from a lot of different nationalities, backgrounds, incomes, ages, sexual orientations, religious points of view, food preferences and helping them to successfully inhabit a limited territory. The basic principle is that everyone has a right to be here."

Seated at the table, he opens his laptop and shows me what he means in a soon-to-be-completed project for a mile-long trio of connected public parks in a downtown neighborhood of Copenhagen surrounded by more than 60 ethnic groups. His presentation opens with photographs of Muslims rioting after the defamatory cartoons of Muhammad were published in Denmark. In hopes of avoiding a reoccurrence, BIG reached out through the media and hosted community meetings, asking people from each nationality to nominate objects from their previous home.

"We wanted to turn the parks into exhibition spaces," he says. "It's not as if Danes designed the world's best trash cans or sewage pipes or park benches."

As images from objects collected or sent from around the world pop up on his screen, he offers commentary. There is a snow cannon from Sweden; Dutch birdhouses; a dangerously tipsy Estonian swing ("we had to cancel that idea because of legal issues"); a replica of a concrete painted elephant from Chernobyl ("the original is still radioactive"); Guyanese flowerpots; a painting of a molar that was signage for a Qatar dentist.

Organized to help immigrants feel more at home in Denmark, the project doesn't ignore the reality of conflict. "It's not a politically correct integration," claims Ingels. In choosing an objet trouvé from Israel, for example, BIG realized they needed something that couldn't easily be vandalized, and settled on manhole covers.

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Ingels's book "Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution."
F.Martin Ramin

This "curating of ideas" is, he points out, "an extreme version of the way we work in the office." He initiates but doesn't dominate the process. "Everybody from the clients to the partners knows what we're doing and can propose stuff. I also propose stuff. We might agree or disagree. It's not as if one person or group has a monopoly on taste."

Architecture practice in the U.S. is not usually so open and democratic. Several projects for which BIG is a candidate, including one for a prestigious museum in the U.S., he is forbidden to discuss. "I had my own office in Denmark for 10 years before I came to America," he says. "I had never had a client meeting with a lawyer in the room. Never. And I had never signed a nondisclosure agreement. But that's how it is here."

Whether Americans will respond happily to his ideas once they take shape as steel and glass is another question. Stern, an architect who is a scholar of the New York apartment house, observes that the eccentric profile of the 57th Street building would probably "not be suitable for the middle of Manhattan. But for the edge of the island, it might be just right. We shall see."

With projects in 10 countries, from China and South Korea to France and Germany, Ingels knows he doesn't have much cause to complain these days. Work is steadily coming in but the firm isn't "crazy growing." The American dream that anyone can and everyone deserves to have it all—epitomized in his mind by our invention of "surf and turf"—is also his.

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TOXIC AVENGER | The boardwalk at the Maritime Youth House, cleverly built over a former toxic-waste site
Jens Lindhe

His easygoing and attentive sociability seems to have been one of the keys to his public success in Scandinavia and should ease his acceptance here. Being a foreigner in a country where few speak his native tongue also has its advantages. "I'm constantly translating Danish phrases in my head into English," he reports. "I'll tell people, 'In Denmark we say . . .' and then what comes out is something totally ridiculous. I could say anything and claim it's something we say in Denmark."

At the end of the meal, he checks his iPhone and learns from his new "perfect assistant," who speaks Spanish, French and Portuguese, that he is not urgently needed. Pushing back from the table, he cracks open his fortune cookie and reads it aloud: "A brilliant time is in store for you."

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